Description: Crime fiction writer Cornwell adds yet another volume to the Jack the Ripper literature. She argues that the serial killer had to be the painter Walter Richard Sickert (d. 1942) and that the killings continued beyond the 1888 murder spree. She presents a portrait of Sickert as deranged by genital deformations and points to clues in his paintings and his biography as giving weight to her description of him as psychopathic. Explorations of the physical evidence, including DNA tests commissioned by Cornwell are presented and new clues are sought in the accounts of the murders of the Ripper's victims.

Description: The 'book of the dead' is the morgue log, the ledger in which all cases are entered by hand. For Kay Scarpetta, however, it is about to have a new meaning. Fresh from her bruising battle with a psychopath in Florida, Scarpetta decides it's time for a change of pace. Moving to the historic city of Charleston, South Carolina, she opens a unique private forensic pathology practice, one in which she and her colleagues offer expert crime scene investigation and autopsies to communities lacking local access to competent death investigation and modern technology. It seems like an ideal situation, until the murders and other violent deaths begin. A woman is ritualistically murdered in her multi-million-dollar beach home. The body of an abused young boy is found dumped in a desolate marsh. A sixteen-year-old tennis star is found nude and mutilated near Piazza Navona in Rome. Scarpetta has dealt with many brutal and unusual crimes before, but never a string of them as baffling, or as terrifying, as the ones before her now. Before she is through, that book of the dead will contain many names and the pen may be poised to write her own. The first name in forensics. The last name in suspense.

Judy Hammer has accepted the challenge of Richmond, Virginia's police department to try and reverse the escalating crime statistics in the city. She brings with her Deputy Chief Virginia West and Andy Brazil, now a full-time police officer. They find a lot of things they are all too familiar with - teenage gangs, a rash of robberies at cash dispensers, street corner drug-dealing, racial tensions, too many people with too many guns and a cardiac inducing lack of parking spaces. They also meet resentment from the established police force and over-high expectations from the city's institutions. Then a computer virus crashes the police computer, freezing their screens with a design of blue fish, and the same blue fish appears on the statue of Jefferson Davis, which a graffiti artist has turned into a black basketball player and a gang called the Pikes claim it is their symbol, which also has links to the robberies. In an incredibly fast-moving police procedural Patricia Cornwell takes her readers on a roller-coaster ride of action and emotion.

Description: A harrowing chase through cyberspace and the streets of New York City takes forensic pathologist Kay Scarpetta to places she has never known--and much too close to home--in this new work from America's #1 bestselling crime writer.

Description: Four women with nothing in common, united only in death. Four brutalized victims of a brilliant psycopath who moves undetected through a paralyzed city, leaving behind a trail of carnage, but no clues. — When the police come up empty-handed, Dr. Kay Scarpetta, a skilled and unrelenting medical examiner, gets the call. Afraid more victims will follow, she works her lab overtime for leads. But someone inside wants to kill her investigation - worse, someone wants to kill her, too!